Review: Acquia Webinar on Profiting from Drupal-Powered Semantics
Back in June of last year when Google, Bing and Yahoo! introduced Schema.org I wrote about how it would be a game changer for the semantic web. The problem was that it was difficult at best to implement semantic vocabulary on a website, even in Drupal 7. But that has all changed now.
How To Add Presentational Javascript to Your Drupal 7 Site
If you want your Drupal 7 site to have a easy user interface with unique effects, you will likely need to add presentational javascript/jQuery to your theme at some point. There are two situations where we might need to add some presentational javascript that each require a different approach:
Battle of the Drupal 7 Modules: CKEditor vs WYSIWYG
CKEditor is the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor of choice around the Digett office. While some may bemoan the use of a WYSIWYG editor at all, even an experienced developer can usually save a lot of time during content entry by using one. Drupal does not come with a built-in editor but there are many excellent options; CKEditor is the cream of the crop.
Leave Arial and Times in the past — @font-your-face to the rescue
If you are a graphic designer or Drupal themer, you don't need to be stuck using Arial on your website; you can easily use a great typeface from one of several providers and implement them using a Drupal module called @font-your-face.
Revisited: Mega Menus in Drupal 7
Back in September, I wrote a blog post about making Mega Menus in Drupal. After publishing the post I found numerous issues with the proposed method and ended up using another method on the project that precipitated the article. After recently receiving a few comments on the original post I realized that it was time for a followup.
Change the Output of a Single Field on a Drupal 7 Node
Overriding the output of an individual field on a node can be done by overriding the node template, but it sure does feel like overkill for just one field. Sometimes it would be great to just override the field itself without touching the field values in the database.
Overriding Page Templates per Content Type in Drupal 7
Overriding a template file is relatively common task for a front-end developer, but depending on the base theme used it’s not always clear how to go about doing it.
Digett's Favorite Drupal 7 Contrib Modules
We've been using Drupal 7 for all new sites for the past few months now, so we’ve put together a base site that we mirror to begin development on each new site. These are the contrib modules that we use on our base site. The modules in the Foundational and Everysite lists are always enabled by default.
Lessons Learned from a Hacked Website
Within the last couple of months one of our client’s websites was hacked. This is a rarity, and we responded swiftly to restore a previous version of the site; however, we still needed to get rid of the actual problem. Through the experience there were a number of lessons learned that anyone, whether client or developer could benefit from.
5 Fields Modules for Drupal 7
The addition of Fields in Drupal 7 core has created quite a shakeup in the modules that interact with fields and create new kinds of fields. In Drupal 6 they were all CCK field modules, but now many of them have changed names or been replaced completely with new modules that better leverage the Drupal 7 entity concept. Over the last few month, these five modules have become some of my favorites for those sites that need more complexity in the fields that are created and how they relate to one another.
ReferencesThe References module contains the ‘node reference’ and ‘user reference’ modules that were separate in Drupal 6. There are two other approaches to this same idea in the Relation and Entity Reference modules, but I find this module just works the way I expect without any headache even though it’s only a beta.
Adventures in the Drupal Community
An early new year’s resolution for me is to become more involved in the Drupal community. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for months, but Angie “webchick” Byron’s keynote at DrupalCamp Austin on November 19 gave me the tangible steps and motivation to jump in. It has been a lot easier to get involved than I anticipated.
5 Tips for Running a Drupal 7 site on Rackspace Cloud Sites
Without going into the positives and negatives of Rackspace’s Cloud Sites platform, there are a few tips that we’ve learned that will help you Run, Deploy and Maintain a Drupal 7 site on this platform.
Forget mobile, go responsive?
I recently attended DrupalCamp Austin and went to several sessions on mobile. It was a little funny how they contradicted each other. One session would talk about how mobile is the way to go then another session would talk about going responsive. I've been on the fence on which I think is the right approach. I've done lots of mobile sites, but I hadn't jumped into the responsive world yet. So for a recent project, I decided to give it a try.
First off, what do I mean?By mobile, I'm talking about creating a site with a different HTML/CSS markup but serving the same content. When I do mobile, I generally use a tool to determine if the user is on a mobile device and then I serve the different content designed for the mobile device.